Email: [mailto:Christophe.Muller@removethat.research.gemplus.com] ---- '''Why Tcl?''' Hello, I have been working with TCL since 1993 and I'm still a big fan of it, even if Java has become more important in my new job at Gemplus [http://www.gemplus.com/], a Smart Cards [http://www.scdk.com/atsfaq.htm] manufacturer. I have been working on a Java framework for using Smart Cards named OpenCard Framework (OCF), see the web site I have set-up for more details: http://www.gemplus.fr/developers/technologies/opencard/ and the official OCF site: http://www.opencard.org/ . During three years, I have also been involved in OCF consortium technical committee and have specified its process for work with the help of Gary Ellison, from Sun (see http://www.opencard.org/work/ ). My interests are detailed (not very much) in my Advogato ''Personal info'' page: http://advogato.org/person/cmuller/ Now that I am working in a new project, I am back to using Tcl because I have set up an internal wiki for the project. I started from [Jean-Claude Wippler]'s very good [Wikit] tool, written in Tcl and using his [MetaKit] database, and I have made a couple of changes. This is why I love Tcl actually, it's the language where you can take any piece of code written by anybody else and understand and modify it, I was already doing that 15 years ago and it still works! For me Tcl is '''the''' "Open Source" language, just try to do that with C++! ---- '''BTW, of course, feel free to modify this page at will, it is a work in progress...''' ---- '''Wikit''' The part below is devoted to the project of enhancing [Wikit]. ''News'' Jean-Claude [JCW] :-) has recently announced in [WiKit under CGI] a new version of wikit named '''nwikit''' (see the Wikit Home Page [http://www.equi4.com/wikit/] for more details) and I'd like to finish working on my patches and then try to integrate everything in his new version.. (but some features are still being implemented at that time). ''Rationale'' One question one's might ask is ''Why not using a Perl or PHP wiki that is already much more developed than wikit?''. And my answer is that I'm very much concerned by the usability issue. I see other wikis with embedded HTML, ''%variables%'', keywords, plugins, etc. and IMHO, they have many advantages but they also have a big drawback, their learning curve is slowly becoming as steep as HTML or LaTeX or even worse (Word!). Actually I even find the rendered HTML pages difficult to read and so difficult to use! with many links, tables, etc. '''KISS''' is a good principle in UI (still IMHO). See in the links below Dr Nielsen's site. So yes, I would like more powerful features in wikit, and also a better looking CSS-ized HTML code with a few nice looking features but no I don't want Word at all. For this reason, I prefer to slowly modify wikit in a way that suits this philosophy rather than switch to Twiki, PHPWiki, or you-name-it. A good example of this is that I have introduced the notion of headers in wikit but there is no new markup! :-) ''Roadmap'' Already implemented features are: * Page Editing Conflict Detection, * Local FS access throug the new local:// protocol, * Possibility of labelling the external links, * "Titles" added to numbered links in brackets, * Generation of headers for the title (H1), bold (H2) or italic (H3) lines, * Addition of ''named anchors'' for headers, to make linking easier, * Link to the [Help] page in every footer * Static caching of pages after each edition for speed-ups * Export script that allows to tag some of the pages as ''public'' and export them to a static web site (was useful for us..) Plus the integration of two patches: * the ''Image Embedding'' patch, also applied here, and * the ''Last Diffs'' patch from Brian Theado, the author of [tkoutline] (for seeing it in action, see its own wiki [http://tkoutline.sourceforge.net/wiki/0^]). BTW, I find it very nice the way Brian found as access to the diff. My roadmap is: 1. Finish implementing the new enhancements (see below) 2. Port everything to the new nwikit 3. Work on future enhancements, from the suggestion list (see below) Still in progress are: * I didn't take the time to integrate a second patch from Brian dealing with "Table of Contents", * Support for map images, (will be using the Local FS feature in a first time, so for an internet wiki, it would need an upload script in addition, but this is not something very hard), * Support for draw images with a Java applet [http://www.sun.com/950523/appletdef.html] such as Jfig or TWikiDraw, * A small wiki2latex script similar to the wiki2html (see [Wiki format to HTML]) that already exist, to help producting papers.. :-) although a generation of Docbook instead of LaTeX would be fine too, * An index maker script that lists all the existing pages by alphabetic order, or by page number, Suggestions (see also [Suggestions for Wikit]): * Submission of comments by email, * Printable Version link, * Page GC (or page deletion) for an empty page during an amount of time, * Preview button on the edition form showing HTML below the form, * Table syntax (?) I'm not sure about this one.. Maybe a small Java spreadsheet widget generating a GIF would be simpler.. (?), * Email alerts on specific pages, * Conversion of the CGI shell script to pure Tclsh in a first time, then conversion either to FastCGI or to a script that does RPC to a ''wiki server'' using the Tcllib [comm] features, this would dramatically reduce the browsing time (although after the implementation of static pages features, the priority lowered..), * Upload of attachements for using local:// references, * Support for a user-friendly editor as a Java applet that could be launched from the form (?) I'm not so sure about this one either.. it is aimed at "Word users" but I would like them to give a try to wiki syntax first... :-). ---- ''Wow...'' - After seeing all this, I'm now bent more than ever on placing nwikit into CVS. It will, as with MetaKit and TclKit, be essentially a reado-only setup. But in this case with eager interest in helping to consolidate things. There seem to be, right now, ''three'' people working on wikit improvements - not to ignore several who have helped in the past. The CVS setup is not intended to prevent anyone from going their own way and doing whatever they like with the wikit codebase - just an option for those who wish to see things come back full circle. One last comment, *please* consider joining the TclersWiki discussion group on Yahoo. It's been dormant lately, but I suspect that'll change soon. I'll announce my nwikit progress there asap. ''Anyway, great to see all these ideas... -[JCW]'' PS. One of these day's I'll move my notes to the [WiKit] or [Suggestions for Wikit] page, or perhaps create a new page do discuss progress. [CM] Thanks for your fast comment! I also agree that for three developers, a full-featured sourceforge site is really not worth the time to set it up!.. but a CVS with all the versions would be nice. I will try to finish the features that I am currently developing asap, in order to reach a stable state (hopefully). Then I will send a version to you and Brian, so that you can play with it, then I'll try to apply my patches to your new version (CVS might help me there.. :-). BTW, I am subscribed to the TclersWiki mailing-list (Larry put me in :-) BTW, I am not sure that everything listed above will be desirable for the official version, even if some features are very necessary for us internally (I'm thinking about the export mechanism for instance), I'll leave it to you to decide what to integrate... ---- A few interesting links for people working on Wiki engines (there are so many! ;-) '''Biblio''' * The Metakit mailing-list: http://trixie.triqs.com/mailman/listinfo/metakit * The TclersWiki Yahoo Group and mailing-list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TclersWiki * [CL]'s notes on [scripted document]: http://starbase.neosoft.com/~claird/comp.software-eng/scripted_documents.html * Patterns for Scripted Applications: http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~np2/patterns/scripting/index.html * Scripted Documents Archive: http://mini.net/sdarchive/ * The Wysiwyg Applet Editor archive: http://www.bris.ac.uk/ISC/cms/ttw.html * [Tcllib] * The Tcl Wiki indexer source code: http://www.lucidway.org/tclwiki/sourcecode.html * the [tcl wiki package project] * an Emacs Wiki Mode (but for c2 wiki): http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiModeCode * for inspiration, the Twiki development web: http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/WebHome * Similarly, the Open Wiki Suggestions page: http://www.openwiki.com/ow.asp?OpenWiki%2FSuggestions * Finally, Zwiki has submission by email: http://joyful.com/zwiki/ZwikiDevelopment#DevProjects * Good URLs for search engines: http://www.alistapart.org/stories/urls/ * CSS Guidelines: http://www.nypl.org/styleguide/css/guidelines.html * The King of Web Usability, Dr. Jakob Nielsen: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/ ---- [Category Home page]